Email has become a dominant means of communication over the years. Email has been increasingly pervasive, and is commonly used among users within business. In some cases, the sender of an email message expects reply email messages to be in a certain format or to follow some specific syntax. For example, in an email exchange involving a voting process, the reply email messages may be required to contain numbers between −1 and +1 (where −1 indicates “no,” and +1 indicates “yes”). Otherwise, the reply would be less useful, or not useful.
There are existing solutions that address this type of problem. For example, one solution enables the sender to send a form via an email. A recipient can then fill out the form using their email client and send the form back to the sender. The reply email message can be sent as XML and validated using an XML schema. However, the main drawback of this solution is that it requires a fat (and/or proprietary) email client that is configured to understand the form and to render the form properly. A fat email client is an email client that requires software other than the browser that is installed on a given computer. Once configured, the fat email client generates the form using predefined constraints and processes the form. The user cannot change the form or specify the constraints.